2.4. Starting the Installation

Important:

By default, the installation will not make any changes to
the disk(s) before the following message:

Your changes will now be written to disk. If you
have chosen to overwrite existing data, it will
be PERMANENTLY ERASED. Are you sure you want to
commit your changes?

The install can be exited at any time prior to this
warning. If
there is a concern that something is incorrectly configured,
just turn the computer off before this point and no changes
will be made to the system's disks.

This section describes how to boot the system from the
installation media which was prepared using the instructions in
Section 2.3.1, “Prepare the Installation Media”. When using a
bootable USB stick, plug in the USB stick
before turning on the computer. When booting from
CD or DVD, turn on the
computer and insert the media at the first opportunity. How to
configure the system to boot from the inserted media depends
upon the architecture.

2.4.1. Booting on i386™ and amd64

These architectures provide a BIOS
menu for selecting the boot device. Depending upon the
installation media being used, select the
CD/DVD or
USB device as the first boot device. Most
systems also provide a key for selecting the boot device
during startup without having to enter the
BIOS. Typically, the key is either
F10, F11,
F12, or Escape.

If the computer loads the existing operating system
instead of the FreeBSD installer, then either:

The installation media was not inserted early enough
in the boot process. Leave the media inserted and try
restarting the computer.

The BIOS changes were incorrect or
not saved. Double-check that the right boot device is
selected as the first boot device.

This system is too old to support booting from the
chosen media. In this case, the Plop Boot
Manager (http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html)
can be used to boot the system from the selected
media.

2.4.2. Booting on PowerPC®

On most machines, holding C on the
keyboard during boot will boot from the CD.
Otherwise, hold Command+Option+O+F, or
Windows+Alt+O+F on non-Apple® keyboards. At the
0 > prompt, enter

boot cd:,\ppc\loader cd:0

2.4.3. Booting on SPARC64®

Most SPARC64® systems are set up to boot automatically
from disk. To install FreeBSD from a CD
requires a break into the PROM.

To do this, reboot the system and wait until the boot
message appears. The message depends on the model, but should
look something like this:

If the system proceeds to boot from disk at this point,
press L1+A
or Stop+A
on the keyboard, or send a BREAK over the
serial console. When using tip or
cu, ~# will
issue a BREAK. The PROM prompt will be
ok on systems with one
CPU and ok {0} on
SMP systems, where the digit indicates the
number of the active CPU.

At this point, place the CD into the
drive and type boot cdrom from the
PROM prompt.

2.4.4. FreeBSD Boot Menu

Once the system boots from the installation media, a menu
similar to the following will be displayed:

Figure 2.1. FreeBSD Boot Loader Menu

By default, the menu will wait ten seconds for user input
before booting into the FreeBSD installer or, if FreeBSD is already
installed, before booting into FreeBSD. To pause the boot timer
in order to review the selections, press
Space. To select an option, press its
highlighted number, character, or key. The following options
are available.

Boot Multi User: This will
continue the FreeBSD boot process. If the boot timer has
been paused, press 1, upper- or
lower-case B, or
Enter.

Boot Single User: This mode can be
used to fix an existing FreeBSD installation as described in
Section 12.2.4.1, “Single-User Mode”. Press
2 or the upper- or lower-case
S to enter this mode.

Escape to loader prompt: This will
boot the system into a repair prompt that contains a
limited number of low-level commands. This prompt is
described in Section 12.2.3, “Stage Three”. Press
3 or Esc to boot into
this prompt.

The boot options menu is divided into two sections. The
first section can be used to either return to the main boot
menu or to reset any toggled options back to their
defaults.

The next section is used to toggle the available options
to On or Off by pressing
the option's highlighted number or character. The system will
always boot using the settings for these options until they
are modified. Several options can be toggled using this
menu:

ACPI Support: If the system hangs
during boot, try toggling this option to
Off.

Safe Mode: If the system still
hangs during boot even with ACPI
Support set to Off, try
setting this option to On.

Verbose: Toggle this option to
On to see more detailed messages during
the boot process. This can be useful when troubleshooting
a piece of hardware.

After making the needed selections, press
1 or Backspace to return to
the main boot menu, then press Enter to
continue booting into FreeBSD. A series of boot messages will
appear as FreeBSD carries out its hardware device probes and
loads the installation program. Once the boot is complete,
the welcome menu shown in Figure 2.3, “Welcome Menu” will be displayed.

Figure 2.3. Welcome Menu

Press Enter to select the default of
[ Install ] to enter the
installer. The rest of this chapter describes how to use this
installer. Otherwise, use the right or left arrows or the
colorized letter to select the desired menu item. The
[ Shell ] can be used to
access a FreeBSD shell in order to use command line utilities to
prepare the disks before installation. The
[ Live CD ] option can be
used to try out FreeBSD before installing it. The live version
is described in Section 2.10, “Using the Live CD”.

Tip:

To review the boot messages, including the hardware
device probe, press the upper- or lower-case
S and then Enter to access
a shell. At the shell prompt, type more
/var/run/dmesg.boot and use the space bar to
scroll through the messages. When finished, type
exit to return to the welcome
menu.